


Alone (But Not Alone)

by CarrKicksDoor



Series: The Secret Everyday Lives of the Avengers [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Depression, F/M, It Gets Better, Romance, because you're never alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 21:08:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2040231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarrKicksDoor/pseuds/CarrKicksDoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James looks at her, her dark hair in disarray from their earlier dip in the ocean, pale skin tanned and freckled from the sun.  “Why?” he asks quietly. “I’m no good for you.  You would do so much better to run away from me and never look back.”</p>
<p>She puts a finger to his mouth to silence him.  “You don’t get to decide who I love, James Barnes.”</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>The story of Darcy and Bucky as told from The Secret Everyday Lives of the Avengers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alone (But Not Alone)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merideath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merideath/gifts).



> This story deals with depression in some ways. I wrote it for several reasons, but part of it was because this kind of thing needs to be written about, and people with depression need to be reminded that they are not alone, and that they are whole people, and that they deserve to be loved. 
> 
> So in many ways, Bucky Barnes is an analog for some of my experiences over the last fifteen years of my life. I haven't gone into great detail, so I haven't put a lot of warning tags onto the story. But if you have depression, you aren't alone. And if you love someone with depression, you aren't either.

It starts in late July with Chex mix and an irrepressible young woman flopping down on the couch, swinging her legs over his lap and saying, “Hi, I’m Darcy.” She holds out the bowl. “Want some Chex mix?”

There’s no caution in her movements, just an open gesture, so guileless, that he ventures a question in a voice that’s almost rusty because he uses it so seldomly. “Is it sweet?” Things that are sweet turn his stomach.

“Not the way I make it,” she says, grinning. He contemplates while she goes on and takes the risk. It’s still warm from being cooked, and tangy from the Worcestershire sauce, and he could nearly choke on the amount of salt in it, but—“’S good,” he says.

She gets JARVIS to put on some TV and tells Steve to stop hiding around the corner like a creeper, and he tries to pay attention, occasionally being brave enough to take two or three pieces more from the bowl and pop them in his mouth. He can see Steve’s eyes on him, watching as he does.

Darcy knows who he is. She referred to him as Barnes to JARVIS, and Steve’s called him Bucky a few times while they’ve been sitting watching television.

Steve finally gets up halfway through the third episode of _How It’s Made_. “Natasha’s giving Sam another krav maga lesson this afternoon. I’ve got to go make sure she doesn’t kill him. You’ll be okay up here, Buck?”

He looks at Steve, then at Darcy, and nods.

“Steve,” Darcy wheedles, leaning her head back over the arm of the couch. “Would you get me some water before you go?”

Steve rolls his eyes, but heads to the fridge anyway. She leans back up and looks at him. “Do you want something to drink? Water? You didn’t want the Coke.”

He nods, and she leans back again. “Hey, grab two, would you?”

Steve does, and she reaches her arms back over the arm of the couch too, taking the bottles, and handing one to him, tapping the plastic together in a toast.

It’s silent for a minute, only the television in the background, before she speaks again. “You don’t really like it when he calls you Bucky, do you?” she asks. She reaches forward and pats his knee, just forward of where her leg lies over his. “I could feel you twitch, just a little.”

“He says he’s always called me Bucky,” he says, his tone flat.

“You can ask him to call you something else,” Darcy says.

“It makes him happy,” he replies. “He thinks it might jog something loose.”

“What do you want me to call you?” she asks.

He stares at her a moment. They’ve called him ‘Bucky’ or ‘Barnes’ or, in the case of JARVIS, ‘Sergeant Barnes,’ and Natalia has very carefully avoided addressing him directly at all, but no one has asked him that question before.   “James,” he says softly. Because in his mind, he is still _the asset_ or _Ziminy Soldat_ or sometimes now _Bucky_ or _Sergeant Barnes_ , but none of them are right.

He can’t remember the last person who called him James. Perhaps the priest who baptized him? Or his mother, using his full name to call down wrath on a misbehaving child? Speculation is all he has.

“Nice to meet you, James,” she says, holding out her hand, and James Barnes tentatively shakes hands with Darcy Lewis.

***

“What are you reading?” a soft voice says from above Darcy, and she starts, which is just bad for everything concerned. She has a tendency to read upside down, legs propped up over the back of the sofa, while her arms, head and book drape toward the ground. The only way she keeps from upending herself in surprise is that his reflexes catch her before she can completely manage to fall off the couch in an ungainly baby giraffe-like sprawl, and with barely a word, he’s lifted her and re-positioned her upright on the couch. “I’m sorry,” he says, shoulders hunched as he curls around himself. “I’ll go.”

“No, James,” she says, laughter in her voice, and he turns slightly. “It’s okay. Come sit down.   If I had a quarter for every time I fell off the couch reading like that, I’d have at least, oh, five dollars.”

There’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth, and Darcy internally takes that as a win, patting the seat next to her. “To answer your question, I’m not reading anything exciting or fun. You know I’ve gone to work for Stark Industries, right? With Agent Hill?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you did before.”

“Mostly chase Jane around. Helped her with physics. I don’t always understand what she does, but I’m good at finding patterns in data, if I have an idea of what I’m looking for,” Darcy says. “But my degree is in political science. I just stuck around with Jane because international relations seems a bit anticlimactic when you’re dealing when you’ve started dealing with intergalactic relations.”

He nods. “But you don’t do that anymore,” he says.

“No,” Darcy says. “Everyone’s still going through the SHIELD files, and that includes Maria and I. I’m part of the inner circle, I guess, and I’ve been trained to do this sort of analysis. And while everyone else is still trying to catch up, we have two things on our side—the former assistant director of SHIELD and JARVIS.”

“And you,” he says slowly, “because you recognize patterns in data. And when it comes to this kind of thing, you do know what you’re looking for.”

She grins at him, pointing finger guns at him. “Got it. So what I’m reading is this incredibly boring policy treatise from a known HYDRA agent, looking for clues, anything suspicious.”

He hesitates a moment, staring at the bland government issue cover. “You have another asset you could use.”

He knows she’s staring at him, even though he isn’t looking at her, and eventually, she turns the corner of the page down, and sets the slim volume on the table. “James,” she says quietly. “I won’t deny that there were some discussions about asking you if you could help. Both Steve and Natasha had some things to say about that. So did Sam and Maria.”

“What did you say?” he asks.

“The same thing Sam did,” she says. “That it was wrong of them not to give you the option. To give you the choice. Maria thinks we need the help. Natasha is afraid it might trigger something. Steve, though, thinks you’ll feel that you have to. That you won’t give yourself a choice in the matter.”

He looks away, straight across the room, at nothing in particular, silent, and she lets him stare off into space. They sit there for almost five minutes before she reaches out for her book again, returning to her page, still letting him sit in his silence, trying to process everything. These are the times when he almost wishes he could just shut back down, when he almost wishes for the chair and the electricity to clear everything, for the blankness and the quiet, for the solitude of the cryo tank, and the focus of the mission, anything to turn off the cacophony of thoughts in his head. It’s why he can pace for hours with insomnia, unable to turn off his brain, and then sleep for days at a time, the only way his mind will shut down and leave him any semblance of peace.

Darcy finally rises an hour later, gently leaning over, cradling his head with one hand and pressing her lips against his temple. “You are a person, not an asset, James,” she says firmly. “And your only responsibility is to your own wellbeing. Make your decision based on that.”

He tells Hill two days later that he would like to help, but he can’t. Not yet. When he can, he will let her know. Hill studies him for a moment and nods. Darcy smiles at him as he leaves, and later that night, James realizes that her gentle kiss to his temple was the first gesture of affection he’s received from anyone other than Steve in seventy years.

***

He finds himself becoming more and more in sync with Steve, as if his body remembers what his mind does not. His brain is healing, Bruce tells him, and he’s becoming more and more stable, the programming slipping away faster and faster, even though his memories are still patchy. He’s instinctively returning to parts of himself that were Bucky. His and Steve’s strides start to match, Tony tells them it’s creepy how they both turn their heads and give people the same irritated look, and they both shout “Stop letting him pitch!” in unison at the television when Homer Bailey gives away three runs in the first inning.

Darcy has informed him that she grew up watching football, not baseball. He thinks that’s probably a good thing, because while baseball still resembles the same game, football is something else. He still remembers the infield fly rule and explains it to her easily, as a ball neatly falls into Zach Cozart’s glove. He sees Steve smile out of the corner of his eye.

Later that night, he asks Steve if he thinks that Darcy would like a Cincinnati Reds shirt to wear when she watches the games with them. They pick one out, get JARVIS to make sure that it’s the correct size, and it comes to the tower two days later. He takes it to her office. “Uh, I got something for you,” he says. “Well, Steve and I did. He helped pick it out.”

She lights up. “A present?”

He holds out a folded bundle of red fabric, artfully faded to look as vintage as he and Steve. She shakes it out and squeals before bouncing up out of her chair and launching herself at him, shirt still in hand, and he finds himself enveloped in a hug. “I love it,” she announces.

James is a little stunned, standing there, and she pulls back. “I’m sorry,” she says, immediately contrite. “I surprised you. I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” he breathes. “It’s okay.” He pauses. “Try it again?”

She sets the shirt down on her desk, and reaches up, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him to her. James lets his own arms wrap around her, gently holding her for a moment, long enough to close his eyes, smell the floral scent of her shampoo, feel the warmth of her body next to his, and then release her. “Thank you,” she says. “I really do love it.”

James nods and offers her a tentative smile. “I’m glad. I’ll let you get back to work now.”

He does, but as he leaves, he hears her bounce into Maria’s office and say, “Look what my boys got me!”

***

“Jaaaaaames,” Darcy says. “Want to go on a field trip?” She holds up several reusable bags.

He hesitates. “To where?” He hasn’t left the tower since he arrived. The tower means safety, which he’s had very little of, and that in itself means comfort the likes of which he hasn’t had in years. There is danger outside the tower, and his muscles tense at the very idea. If he could cocoon himself inside, he thinks he would.

“Well,” she says, “you know how you don’t like eating things you haven’t checked out?” He nods. “There’s a farmer’s market at Union Square. You can go, check things out at the source, even talk to the people who grow the food. Pepper gave me money to go and pick up stuff. I’ve got a list—“ she waves a piece of paper in the air—“and she told me to get whatever else I wanted, and I thought you might want to go along.”

Two instincts suddenly war inside. One screams to stay in the tower. The other tells him that this is a sensible plan, tactically sound, and good to secure his food supply, and that it allows him to protect a valued civilian, to be useful in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. She waits out his thoughts, like she always does, and he rises. “Let me get a jacket,” he says, gesturing with his arm, and she nods, plunking herself down on the arm of the sofa.

He hurries back to the apartment he shares with Steve, grabbing a light jacket that will cover his arm from prying eyes, the cell phone from his dresser, and a hairband to keep his hair out of his face. The scruff of a beard he wears now is enough that it should keep people from connecting him to the Winter Soldier. He pauses outside Steve’s bedroom, though. Steve keeps a uniform there and a small arsenal, just in case a call comes in the middle of the night, and James slips in. He hasn’t armed himself while he’s been in the tower, but out in public is different. He takes two knives, one small locking blade he slips into his pocket, and another that he straps to his ankle, and a 9 mm Beretta that he tucks in the back waistband of his jeans, and hopes he gets it back before Steve notices that it’s gone. He should be able to keep it concealed—New York has strict gun laws, but he has been the Winter Soldier, and that means something.

Darcy pops up when he comes out and happily leads him from the tower, chatting at him the whole way, and James wonders if she knows that he’s nervous, though he’s keeping it from his face. But Darcy seems to have been able to read him since she first met him, and when they get to the market, he has so much else to focus on, that for the first time in months, he feels drawn out of his own head, distracted, able to look around and experience something else. He picks up cucumbers and cantaloupe, and Darcy buys a bag of apples so red they trigger a sudden memory of seeing _Snow White_ in the theatre with Steve and he tells her about it, watching her smile as he does so. She says they remind her of William Tell, and he wonders if she knows that Barton is somewhere in the crowd, keeping watch. He doesn’t mind that the archer’s there too. It gives him a sense of relief to know that there’s backup around.

That’s until Darcy suddenly disappears from his immediate area, and panic sets in, clawing at his chest. He remembers this feeling, the same feeling he got when the chair clamped down on his arm, as he searches for the red t-shirt he’d bought her in the crowd. He has his cell phone in hand, ready to call Barton, when he sees her, and he nearly sprints over to her. “Don’t do that,” he breathes out. “I thought someone got to you.”

Her face blanches when she realizes she’s scared him. “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s okay, I’m here. And Clint’s around here somewhere, too.” That answers the question of whether or not she knows Barton’s on overwatch for them. “Nothing’s happened. I’ll try not to do that to you again.”

She does make an effort on later trips, and he keeps a closer eye on her when her natural exuberance overrides her brain, and she rushes over to whatever catches her eye, but it helps to know that he’s not the only one protecting her, even if he’s falling into the fiction that Barton isn’t there to protect her (and everyone else) from him.

In the back of his mind, something ugly whispers, _Love is for children_. James ruthlessly quashes it down.

***

“I’ll kill him,” Darcy growls to herself. “I’m going to fucking kill him. Motherfucking bastard.”

Jane looks up from her computer. “Who does Thor need to kill?”

“Stark,” Darcy says, sitting down. She stays there for approximately two seconds before rising again, swiping a pen from the desk and throwing it across the room. “ _Damn_ him. Tony Stark is the most insensitive, self-serving—“ she can’t even finish the sentence, trailing off in a sound of general frustration instead. “Steve’s already blistered his hide, and I know that Pepper’s going to read him the riot act as soon as she finds out. And now James is holed up in his and Steve’s apartment, and he won’t talk to anyone, not even Steve, all because Tony fucking Stark thinks he’s so damn funny.”

Jane gets up, puts her hands on Darcy’s shoulders and says, “Okay, breathe. I understand that you’re pissed with Tony, but you haven’t told me _why_.”

All the fight seems to go out of Darcy, and she sinks back into the chair. “HYDRA arranged the assassination of Howard and Maria Stark,” she says quietly. “And they used the Winter Soldier to do it. I think James has known for a while. And so has Tony.”

“Oh, God,” Jane says, pulling her own chair over. “And Tony Stark holds grudges better than anyone.”

“Tony Stark should also know better than anyone what kind of things torture can do to a person,” Darcy says quietly. “And what post-traumatic stress is like. But you know Tony. Most of the time, he’s as subtle as a freight train. And then sometimes—“

“—sometimes he’s like Natasha, and you never see it coming,” Jane says.

“We were just bitching about _Almost Human_ not getting renewed,” Darcy says. “That’s all. And for a man who was literally part machine himself, the Tin Man’s got a lot of nerve saying anything to anyone—and—“ Darcy rubs her face with her hands. “Jane, the look on his face. It was like watching a vase fall off the table and knowing that even if you lunged for it, it was going to just—shatter. And it did. You could see something break. And then he just went blank. And he got up and left. He won’t answer anyone. And Steve just lit into Tony, and Tony just turned around and said that Steve should shut up because he was letting a murderer live here.”

“And Steve didn’t kill him?” Jane asks.

“Thor heard the shouting and got between them,” Darcy says. “I think he’s in the gym letting Steve beat the shit out of him right now.”

And without warning, Darcy suddenly bursts into tears. Jane scoots forward, wrapping her arms around her friend. “He was doing so much better,” Darcy sobs. “So much better. And I don’t know how to help this time.”

“Sometimes, all you can do is be there for someone,” Bruce says from the doorway. He looks incredibly tired, and his shirt is buttoned up the wrong way. “I wanted to try to help stop it, but it was all I could do to keep the Other Guy from having his tantrum before I got down to containment. I’m sorry.”

Darcy wipes her eyes. “You don’t ever have to apologize for that.”

“And Barnes doesn’t have to ever apologize for who he is, either,” Bruce says. “Tony does, because he’s an asshole.”

“He’s your best friend,” Jane says.

“He’s still an asshole,” Bruce says, his voice still radiating calm. “Darcy, even if he won’t talk to you, go sit with him, if he’ll let you. Sometimes—“ he pauses. “sometimes that helps. Just knowing you aren’t alone. That there’s someone there who cares enough to come do that, because trust me, intellectually, he knows that there are people here who care about him, but everything else in him is telling him that’s not true. You and Steve are the only people I think he’ll let close, and Steve isn’t—“

“Steve’s still so wrapped up in his own guilt that he’s more hindrance than help sometimes,” Darcy finishes, taking the tissue Bruce offers her and blowing her nose ungracefully.

JARVIS lets her into Steve and James’ apartment with a quiet apology for Tony’s behavior. Darcy pats the wall and tells him it’s okay, because if JARVIS apologized for everything Tony did, he’d do nothing else. She deliberately makes noise as she takes off her shoes at the door, and walks through the apartment, righting the stack of books about history that she’d loaned the boys and folding the afghan haphazardly tossed over the back of the couch. She makes her way down the hallway, stopping to see a hole in the right side of the wall that wasn’t there the last time she remembers, so she ducks into the bathroom and retrieves the first aid kit.

She knocks quietly on James’ bedroom door before entering. He’s lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and her instinct was right. In the dim light, his right hand, the one made of flesh and blood, is bloodied from its impact with the wall, and she sits down on the side of the bed, opening the kit. “JARVIS, raise the lighting by fifteen percent,” she asks quietly.

JARVIS complies without comment, giving her enough light to see his hand. It will heal by tomorrow, but she gently cleans the blood away with an alcohol wipe anyway. If it stings, she can’t tell, because he doesn’t react, and Darcy feels her heart sink into her stomach just a little bit more, because she knows—she _knows_ —that the fist through the wall was meant to make himself feel pain, to convince himself that he’s still human. She puts gauze over the contusions, tapes it down, then closes the kit and sets it on the nightstand. He takes his hand away, the first voluntary movement he’s made since she came into the room, and rolls onto his side away from her.

Without saying anything else, she sets her glasses on top of the first aid kit and crawls up beside him, plastering herself against his back, tucking her face into his neck, arm around his chest until her hand interlaces with the fingers of his bandaged hand.

“Don’t go away on me,” she whispers into his hair. “I love you too much to lose you.”

She’s not sure he registers what she’s said until his fingers briefly squeeze hers. Eventually, she hears his breath even out into sleep. She’s still awake when Steve’s shadow stops in the doorway. She lifts her head from the pillow, and he nods. He disappears a moment, bringing the afghan from the couch to drape over them before disappearing. The lights lower when he leaves, and knowing that both she and Steve can protect James, Darcy finally falls asleep.

***

Programming the fabrication units to mistake hot rod red for bubble gum pink isn’t difficult. It’s probably petty as all hell, but despite working for Hill, Darcy still has Jane’s codes for the machines, and she simply makes the paint tint misread. Since changing the color does nothing harmful, JARVIS feels no reason to inform Tony of the change until Tony asks.

Tony doesn’t ask until he flies out with the team to take out a HYDRA base in the newly repaired and painted set of armor, and Natasha smirks and tells him how much she likes the color. JARVIS is forced to rat out the perpetrator.

JARVIS does warn Darcy (and Maria) when Tony comes back, stomping through the offices and stopping in Darcy’s. She’s waiting for him, standing with her arms crossed. In her heels, she’s the same height as him and before he opens his mouth, she channels Natasha and Maria and Pepper and her 10th grade English teacher, and with every piece of determination and fury she has, she says, “ _Don’t fuck with James._ ”

“Look here, Lewis—“ Tony starts, but she doesn’t give him the chance to finish.

“Don’t ‘look here, Lewis,’ me,” she snaps. “I may not be an Avenger, but I will damn well protect those I consider mine. Jane was mine before she was Thor’s, and you better believe I fucking took down a god with a taser to keep her safe, and if I have to, I will do it again. James is mine, too, and I swear to God, Stark, if you hurt him again, there will be nothing in this universe that will keep you safe, do you understand me?”

He grits his teeth. “Didn’t think you usually needed to stake your claim that emphatically, Lewis.”

“You stupid—“ she lets out. “Jane is mine. James is mine. And Steve and Clint and Natasha and Bruce and Thor and Coulson and Maria and Pepper and you too, you motherfucking asshole, and the only way you become _not_ mine is when you turn around and deliberately hurt someone else who is. You’re supposed to be the genius, so can you get what I’m trying to say through your thick skull? This is a _family_ , you halfwit. And I realize that the Winter Soldier took yours from you before yours had a chance to figure out what they were doing and maybe unscrew up the mind fuckery they put you through, but the Winter Soldier and James Barnes are two different people, and it’s time you started seeing them that way.”

She turns around and sits back down at her desk. “Get out of my office,” she says, without looking up. “I’ll be able to forgive you for all this later, but not right now.”

Two minutes later, she looks up to find Tony gone, but Maria standing in his place. “That was impressive,” Maria says, arms crossed.

“He was out of line,” Darcy says, her attention back on her computer screen.

“Not many people would go toe to toe with their boss like that,” Maria says, her tone measured.

Darcy freezes, then shakes her head. “Pepper’s my boss, not Tony. And even if he was, I don’t give a shit.”

Maria’s mouth quirks up in half a smile. “Damn, what I would have given to have you in my office when SHIELD was up and running.”

***

As fall turns into winter, James gets worse, more withdrawn. At Sam’s suggestion, Tony quietly, and without complaint, replaces all the lights in the tower with daylight bulbs. When asked, he calls it a cost-saving measure. It’s not, but Tony is trying to make up for his actions in his own way. Seasonal affective disorder is a bitch, and if it doesn’t help James, there’s at least more than one person working in the tower who does appreciate it.

Natasha, naturally, is the one who figures it out first. “It’s too much like Russia,” she says quietly to Darcy one day as James stares out the window. “Overcast, grey. Snow and ice and rain.”

So Darcy says something to Pepper, and two days later, as James stares out the window, she steps up beside him and tugs on his sleeve. “Vacation.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Vacation,” she says. “Let’s get out of New York. You and me.”

He runs a hand over his head, smoothing out his hair. It’s very long now, and he keeps it tied back almost all the time. “Where?”

She shrugs. “Where do you want to go? Sky’s the limit. I mean that kind of literally. We could probably go to Asgard if I make puppy eyes at Thor.”

He snorts, the first bit of laughter she’s heard from him in weeks, and she grins. “Some place that’s warmer than this.”

“Caribbean?” Darcy suggests. “I know Stark’s got a house in the Bahamas. I bet Pepper would let us borrow it.”

“It’s going to be Christmas soon,” he says quietly. “Don’t you want to spend it with your family?”

She takes his hand. “Family is who you decide it is, James.”

***

The house is huge, but not ostentatious, which suggests that Pepper had a hand in the decorating, and Darcy can already see that James is breathing easier in the salt air. The waves are crashing on the shore in their soothing rhythm, blue water stretching out as far as the eye can see. He stands on the deck looking out, and she watches from the glass door as he takes it in.

Coulson and Barton are three houses down, she knows, partly as a precaution, but partly so they, too can have some time alone. They shouldn’t ever see them. “Bring your swim trunks?” she asks teasingly.

He turns and smiles, a real, genuine smile. “I’ll race you to the ocean.”

She wins, but only because James stops dead when he sees her in a bikini.

***

They walk along the beach at sunset each evening, hand in hand. “Good idea?” Darcy asks.

“Good idea,” he says. “It’s restful here.”

“Sometimes you need to get away from everything,” she says. “Find someplace that you can go and leave everything else behind and just rest. Really rest.”

James looks out at the ocean. “I feel more like a whole person here,” he says quietly. “And I don’t want to go back.” He looks down at her, a corner of his mouth quirking upward in a self-effacing smile. “I know I have to.”

Darcy snuggles herself into his side, letting her hand trail up and down his back. “You’ve always been a whole person, James. And if you feel like you’re in pieces, then remember that I’m here holding those pieces for you.”

James looks at her, her dark hair in disarray from their earlier dip in the ocean, pale skin tanned and freckled from the sun. “Why?” he asks quietly. “I’m no good for you. You would do so much better to run away from me and never look back.”

She puts a finger to his mouth to silence him. “You don’t get to decide who I love, James Barnes.”

“Why?” he whispers again, as her hand moves to cup his cheek, thumb rubbing against the scruff of his beard. He can’t believe that she can love him, can’t believe that he can be loved, that there’s anything in him worth loving. Steve has to, he thinks, but not Darcy.

“Because you’re you,” she says simply.

“But I’m so fucked up,” he says desperately.

“Loving someone is as much a choice as it is feelings in the heart,” Darcy says quietly. “And I choose to love you, James. Fucked up, not fucked up. You deserve to be loved. Not out of pity or anything like that, but because you are worthy of love, and I am giving you mine freely. And it’s okay if you don’t feel the same way, because I will love you anyway.”

He finally looks at her—really looks at her, meeting her gaze. Her expression is soft, but strong. “You are not alone, James,” she says. “Not anymore.”

There will be days when he still feels that way, he thinks. But this is the moment he tries to fix into his memory, one that he cannot lose, one that no one can take away from him, that he will fight to keep forever, one that tells him he will never be alone again, and he leans down, slowly, to press his lips against hers. She responds gently, her fingers interlacing with his, as he kisses her, and when James finally pulls back, her gaze is even more brilliant in the fading light than it was before.

They switch their hands, and Darcy leans her head against James’ shoulder, and they walk back to the house to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore.

 

 


End file.
